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Obama Significantly Revises Technology Positions
method9455 writes "Barack Obama has edited his official website on many issues, including a huge revision on the technology page. Strangely it seems net neutrality is no longer as important as it was a few months ago, and the swaths of detail have been removed and replaced with fairly vague rhetoric. Many technologists were alarmed with the choice of Joe Biden before, and now it appears their fears might have been well founded." Update: 09/22 18:07 GMT by T : Julian Sanchez of Ars Technica passed on a statement from an Obama campaign representative who points out that the changes in wording highlighted by Versionista aren't the whole story, and that more Obama tech-plan details are now available in a PDF, saying "there is absolutely no substantive change to our policy - folks who want more information can click to get our full plan."
When are people going to learn to assess politicians and parties on their actions, rather than their promises? Those that might have really introduced change have already been weeded out. Vote for the puppet of your choice, folks.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
They've cut out about half the content, and large chunks about what they'll do for kids.
Either they've had advice that they shouldn't be promising definite things (makes it harder to weasel out of stuff later) or they're just cutting down the page size for some reason.
Either way, bit of a non story.
Politician changes mind, big whoop.
They're all rich white men
You mean, except the one black guy, right?
You just got troll'd!
Every American election always reminds me of the phrase from Alien vs Predator.
"Whoever wins, we all lose." or something like that.
The technology stance is important, but there are a lot of substantially more important issues on the table right now.
We're looking at the candidate who has spoken for and stood for change and integrity from before his political career started, and the candidate who has resorted to making bald faced, demonstrably false and misleading lies that in a non-political context would be grounds for a successful slander/libel suit.
When considering technology specifically, your choices are Obama, who at least understands technology well enough to have created a successful social networking style community site, and McCain who admits he barely even knows how to turn his computer on. If you're voting technology, Obama is the clear superior choice to McCain.
I know, 3rd party candidate and all that. I'm a supporter of breaking the 2-party system we have here in the US because I think it really hurts us; but to be completely honest, in this election it is down to two candidates.
It is extremely unlikely that a 3rd party candidate will successfully run for president until there are a fair share of 3rd party candidates in congress who can prove their chops in a way that makes the lot of them look less crazy (some 3rd party candidates look that way, it gives the better ones a bad name). If you support this ideal, trying to support it top-down isn't the way to get it to happen, it's got to be bottom up - local, state, and federal officials.
In the mean time, support a candidate who has the ability and perspicacity to restore our good will with the rest of the world. The way the economy is going right now, in 2 or 4 years, net neutrality is going to be a lot less important than food on the table and whether or not our troops are committing war crimes abroad, and whether or not our government is committing anti-constitutional crimes domestically.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
In fact this is his number one point under "Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Ideas through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets" as it was before. If you read the previous version, it goes from being a bullet point to being a full-blown lecture. Most people would stop reading. I suspect the ideas are all still there, only they are not being listed in so windy a manner.
"Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet."
Barack is completely behind net neutrality, where as McCain is not, but don't let the facts get in the way of the way you try and put FUD out there.
Strangely it seems net neutrality is no longer as important
What the fuck are you talking about? It's THE VERY FIRST GODDAMN THING HE MENTIONS.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan
Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Ideas through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets
* Protect the Openness of the Internet
If you're a McCain supporter trying to weasel votes away on Slashdot, you need to say so.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
It looks to me like they hired an editor to cut the wall of text down to size. The first huge cut under the heading "Protect the Openness of the Internet" kept the main point while eliminating a massive unnecessary explanation. Readers who are unfamiliar with net neutrality would have been turned off by the wall of text anyway. Also, notice that Versionista doesn't track when blocks of text move to different locations on the page. There are a few paragraphs that simply got moved to other sections. This is just a sensationalist headline that doesn't really belong here. It isn't a "position revision." It is an edit that takes a very lengthy page & cuts it down to a more digestible size. Yes, there's new content, and yes, there are revisions. But on the whole, it's nothing to get up in arms about.
Ha, but you're forgetting one thing. Well two actually, he can dance and he can jump! If that doesn't make him black, that makes him pretty fly for a rich white guy.
You just got troll'd!
Yeah, if Harvard and the University of California count as big evil corporations. Refresh my memory, will you please, how many lobbyists work for John McCain again?
You just got troll'd!
OMG! Green leafy vegetables! How did it come to this? How can someone who eats rabbit food be this close to the White House?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This post is pretty much pure bullshit.
If you look at the revisions, Obama has shortened some bullet points to make them more readable.
He still lists what he supports, but he does not going into massive detail in each one of them.
For instance, his current stance on network neutrality is now (emphasis mine):
"* Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet."
Instead of:
"* # Protect the Openness of the Internet: A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet. Users must be free to access content, to use applications, and to attach personal devices. They have a right to receive accurate and honest information about service plans. But these guarantees are not enough to prevent network providers from discriminating in ways that limit the freedom of expression on the Internet. Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against websites that are unwilling to pay for equal treatment. This could create a two-tier Internet in which websites with the best relationships with network providers can get the fastest access to consumers, while all competing websites remain in a slower lane. Such a result would threaten innovation, the open tradition and architecture of the Internet, and competition among content and backbone providers. It would also threaten the equality of speech through which the Internet has begun to transform American political and cultural discourse. Barack Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or non-profit speakers, have the same opportunity as incumbents to innovate on the Internet and to reach large audiences. Obama will protect the Internetâ(TM)s traditional openness to innovation and creativity and ensure that it remains a platform for free speech and innovation that will benefit consumers and our democracy. "
So instead of a massive (and unreadable) paragraph, it is now a very simple bullet point saying that Obama strongly supports network neutrality. How on earth is this "downplaying" network neutrality?
Obama is just another lawyer
Could we please stop attacking lawyers just for being lawyers? Do civil rights attorneys bother you? Consumer rights attorneys? How about the lawyers who argued Brown v. Board of Education? How about Clarence Darrow (argued for the defense in the Scopes Trial)? What about John Adams (Founding Father)? What about Ray Beckerman (aka: NewYorkCountryLawyer)?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that not every lawyer is a RIAA extortionist.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Open Secrets shows Obama accepted far more money from the employees of large corporations than John McCain.
Fixed that for you.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Um, Barack lives right here on the South Side of Chicago. And brother, let me tell you, this ain't the suburbs.
Also, he only became a "millionaire" in the past three years or so after writing a couple of best selling books. He only paid off his and his wife's student loans about five years ago.
He was never "just another lawyer". Ask any of his students from the UofC law school or the people at the community organization at which he worked, for about $29,000 per year.
Don't be a bozo.
You are welcome on my lawn.
These are guesses, or even hopes. I agree that any of the viable candidates are going to serve the corporate interest, but there are important differences.
1. Obama will engage in diplomacy with Iran, and hopefully in covert ways with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the nationalist Iraqi forces. If you're serious about ending terrorism, you have to engage the enemy dipomatically and address the conditions that lead to it. Protip: killing more muslims with western weapons isn't helping.
2. His Administration will sweep out the Bush/Reagan Administration, while McCain would probably keep a lot of it. That's worth my vote right there.
3. Obama does not pander to Jerry Falwell or any of his imitators. It's America, so he has to recognize the religious element, but he doesn't associate with the fundamentalist nutcases.
4. Obama has shown his distaste of the Bush and Clinton Dynasties. Change is good.
Most importantly, Obama is not McCain. McCain has turned from a moderate Republican, who I would have seriously considered voting for in 2000, to a complete shill, pandering to evangelicals, touting proto-fascist military slogans, and most importantly, has shown the same inability to engage in serious self-criticism that has truly frightened the rest of the world in regards to the Bush Administration. McCain also claims to believe that the Iraq war has something to do with counterterrorism or the spread of freedom, which to any serious observer, is total fucking nonsense.
"Actually the black guy qualifies in anyone's book as a rich white guy ... Unless you're totally obsessed with skin color."
Or checklists.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
That is being racially intolerant of his mother. Or does black plus white equal black?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Almost...
Except Barack's net worth is $799,006.
http://fortune535.sunlightprojects.org/lawmaker/507/
Maybe you were thinking of McCain? ($36,431,099)
http://fortune535.sunlightprojects.org/lawmaker/498/
And if you think you will get *any* change from an old man who has been in Office 30 years and only agrees with Bush *MORE* as it gets closer to election, I think you are misguided.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
I think the legal profession is a bit like a priesthood, it actually thrives on obscure interpretations of language and on serious consequences of failing such interpretations. It's like an arms race, if your opponent has a lawyer then you'd better get one yourself and so on. The end result is a legal system that is well beyond the average smart persons capability to interpret.
It should have never ever gotten this far.
If you simply removed all lawyers and let the parties argue their own cases exclusively we'd see two things:
- a significant drop in caseload
- a return to reasonable verdicts instead of verdicts on technicalities
Of course it's a pipe dream (especially in criminal law) but like with most extreme positions it has a grain of truth in it somewhere and it would be nice to be able to shift the 'middle ground' to the point where lay people would stand a chance against a seasoned lawyer, and where verdicts would actually make sense to an informed outsider.
MP3 Search Engine
He became a 'millionaire' because he wrote a couple memoirs? Huh? So writing a couple memoirs is a 'get rich quick' scheme that we should all engage in, it isn't a way for the politically connected to siphon in some green?? Well, then, I guess we should all write our memoirs.
So now we hate authors too?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Okay, well. He fulfills the requirements of 'blackness' for racial stereotyping, or at least he fills in the checkbox on two items on the list, for the camera.
Er, he also fits the white guy by racial stereotyping. Is it any wonder the blacks in America have such a crappy time if people question their "blackness" as soon as they start to achieve? It's like to be black is to fail from these posts.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I keep forgetting -- does having a wife and kids make you rich, or white?
US law schools churn out far more lawyers than we need, yet we have a looming shortage of family physicians since the insurance companies (i.e. their employers) don't want to be bothered actually paying them. The average salary for non-ivy league lawyers is far lower than you might think, particularly if you exclude the hapless drones working at the big lawsuit factories.
We will be able to do without lawyers once we can all agree to make and abide by the rules rationally, i.e never. We COULD do with fewer lawyers which could happen but probably won't.
I'd suggest we would do better with a major reform of the health insurance industry so every doctor doesn't feel compelled to specialize in order to make their investment of time and effort to become doctors (which is far more difficult than in law) pay off.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Eh, I just don't see a line-item veto as anything more than a power grab by the Executive. Have the balls to veto the whole bill if the riders are that bad.
If you really want to fix this problem then I'd suggest starting with gerrymandering and not the line-item veto. If Congressional races were actually competitive maybe our Congress-critters would be more responsive to the citizenry.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This is why America will fall. As I see it, you just turned having an ivy league education into a negative point...
And, he's a rich white guy because he's got a wife and kids? Really? Couldn't think of anything else?
No, you're right. There's absolutely no change between a white child of privilege who's father and grandfather's influences gave him his education and career, and a guy from a single family mixed race household who went to college on scholarship, earned his admittance, and finished in the top of the class.
I was watching campaign ads from previous American presidential elections here -- it starts with the Eisenhower campaign and works forward -- and I was struck by how many candidates used the same rhetoric. "Change" has been a staple campaign theme for a long, long time.
It seemed there were three major types of ads:
There might also have been a fourth, "Our candidate is a nice human being!"
Here are some examples of #2, "Change," below (I've quoted the last sentences from a number of the ads at the above URL):
"Change" is exactly what you can expect the opposition party to be selling in any election. The only reason Obama's campaign seems novel is that we have the collective memory and attention-span of a goldfish.
Although I'm sure you and I agree on how big of a jackass GWB is, you can hardly say he *created* the national debt. I think that honor is shared among a long line of democrats and republicans.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/history.gif
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/inflation.gif
His blackness was questioned by other black people. I believe the quote was about him "lacking slave blood." [Charles Kenzie Steele, Jr.] And let's not forget that by having a white mother he is just as much white as black.
Funny how both sides can simultaneously make race an issue and denounce race as an issue.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
My colour-sampler puts him at #A67A61
Or, alternately, we could probably do without lawyers if we'd just simplify the damn legal code, and we could DEFINITELY do with fewer lawyers if we'd stop making stupid laws.
Take drug laws for example. The US annually arrests upwards of 800,000 people for marijuana violations alone. That means you're creating 1.6 million opportunities for lawyers (prosecutor and defense) on an annual basis. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather open up that industry to farmers, pot-bar/"coffee-house" owners, and other related private ventures, instead of creating jobs for lawyers, judges, police officers, and criminals.
There are countless such examples - marijuana was just the first one to come to mind because I was recently discussing the idea with some friends in law enforcement. Eventually it evolved into a discussion about law enforcement as a whole, and the general consensus seemed to be that we just have way too many pointless laws.
If you want to have a society in which law and order are taken seriously, it's much better to have a few very important laws which you enforce with a high degree of success rather than having a whole slew of laws, half of which you can't effectively enforce, and the other half of which you can only enforce sporadically because you're forced to waste resources on stuff that shouldn't be illegal in the first place. Not only does the current criminal code make law-enforcement less effective, but it makes the legal system unnecessarily complex, wastes taxpayer money on jobs that shouldn't even exist, and actually encourages crime.
What a troll.
The anti-lawyer rhetoric on this board is pretty ridiculous. In case you forgot, the drafters of every open source license are lawyers. Lawrence Lessig is a lawyer. Charles Nesson is a lawyer. The people representing the defendants in RIAA suits are lawyers.
Obama is just another lawyer ... who ... ha[s] a ... stance of ... "hmmm, these RIAA guys, they DO pay kinda nice."
[citation needed] buddy. This truthiness crap is ridiculous. Unless you can prove the RIAA has employed Obama, that's libel. Watch yourself bub.
I'm a right wing Republican whose endorsing John McCain but I am appalled at the way you liberals are once destroying yourselves and your candidate with your withering self doubt. We have on the right have a joke, that is, only Democrats could be so smart as to figure out a way to blow election after election and here you go again.
Can you please have some hope?
What Obama did with his web site was to basically rewrite it from the mishmash that it was into something more coherent. There is nothing substantively different about this restructuring. Obama has always been in favor of strong IP legislation, but, so what of it?
Do you really think that a man who spent his formative years arguing in favor of some form of socialism will suddenly turn his back on that?
Do you really believe that a man who has worked his entire life organizing his own liberal constituency into an election machine is suddenly going to come out looking like Reagan?
I mean, seriously, don't you think Michelle would kick his rear if he even thought of selling out?
I mean come on liberals. You are getting a guy whose is your best standard bearer for your commy liberalism in easily 40 years, if not since Roosevelt, and arguably all time. Obama knows well that which he argues and that's why on the right hate the son of a gun so much. If you are liberally inclined, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Obama is a committed idealist with the trappings of greatness about him and in spades. A minor shift in a political position or a rephrasing of a web site is not going to alter the overall thrust of this man's policy or his life.
So, don't lose faith because some staff member re-edited the web site. Obama is going to deliver for you liberals nearly everything that you believe in if he is elected. Obama is the real deal of liberalism. This is your chance. Don't f--- it up.
Now, quit whining, liberals, as you so often do, and get off your asses and vote for this guy. He's the best you'll have in your lifetime and now is the time to go for it.
This is my sig.
You really have to question the submitters' motivation on this one.
If anybody bothered to read the diff, it is obvious that the page was re-written to improve accessibility, so that more voters can understand the issues. Long paragraphs were shortened and some of the details were omitted so that the page does not sound like a treatise.
Some of the items like immigration was taken out, I suppose, because it didn't belong on the technology page. A lot of the text was rearranged, I assume, for better structure.
If all you wanted to know about is net neutrality, then yes, a lot of the material that described the mechanism in detail is gone. However, this issue has been debated to death online and most people have less of an idea of how the internet works than Ted Stevens. I seriously don't think Obama has changed his stance on this, other than to put it on equal footing with other issues related to technology on that page.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
If you removed all lawyers and let all parties argue their own cases, you'd immediately see a drastic shift in power to the upper class and more educated, who would actually know the law, and have time to study and interpret it. The reason we have lawyers is so that EVERYONE has an expert on the law on their side. Also there'd be a shift in power towards prosecution, since the state pretty much by definition has to have a lawyer, or at least one person who puts forward cases against a multitude of defendants.
In the US, it usually makes you a man ;)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
The thing is, all this could be solved by adding a "Read More" link to expand out the section to include more detail. In its current version, it does look watered down to be more corporate-friendly even if that was not the intent.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
McCain's income is missing his wife's, which should be fair game to include. All reasonable people would consider that "household" income anyway. Good job playing games with the percentages though.
If anybody bothered to read the diff, it is obvious that the page was re-written to improve accessibility, so that more voters can understand the issues. Long paragraphs were shortened.
The original page is a huge amount of text -- 5462 words on the page. This is like "War and Peace" for a web page. The new version only has 3319 words on the page and the text has been simplified.
The average person reads around 200-250 WPM for fifth grade reading material. For technically detailed information (the earlier version of the webpage), the rate can drop to 70-80 words per minute.
The first version had a large number of technical details and was extremely long. Assuming a generous 100 WPM for non-technical readers, it would have taken nearly an hour (54 minutes) to read. The new version is much less wordy and the technical details have been simplified a bit so if we assume a faster reading speed of at least 200 WPM, it will still take most people over 15 minutes to read.
What Obama really should do is make the web page smaller still - to the 5 minutes-to-read range and then have an extended document like the original page that you can download to read over an hour or two if you want the technical details.
Yes, Barack Obama, by mentioning arugula, has shown he is the elitist among the major party candidates.
John McCain, on the other hand, is just chock-full of mavericky goodness and simple values, and isn't elitist at all, despite the fact that he and his wife own a private jet and 8-12 homes on 8 properties (McCain says he doesn't know... it must be hard to keep track), spent $273,000 on household employees last year, and THIS JUST IN: own 13 cars. Oh, and despite McCain's claims that he has only bought American cars all his life, those cars include a Honda, a Lexus, and a Volkswagen, and also in the family is the Prius he boasted about his daughter buying just last year when he was pandering to voters with different concerns.
Oh, and Cindy McCain may have worn a $313,100 outfit on the first night of the Republican convention and said you just can't get around Arizona without a private plane, but trust the people who brought you the Iraq war: she's as down-to-Earth and "simple folk" as they come.
Those "uppity" Obamas, with their one house, on which they got a better-than-average mortgage deal (gasp!) based on Obama's senate income and book proceeds, have one car for the family. And both Obamas paid for their education with student loans, with Barack, who was raised by a single mother and his grandparents, ending up as president of the Harvard Law Review. John McCain, the son and grandson of Navy Admirals, was practically the definition of a legacy admission at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Yeah, that arugula comment really tells the whole story of who's an elitist.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner